Understand your Audience
by Santosh
This weekend, the Pune OpenCoffee Club meets to discuss Marketing for Web Startups. We are incredibly lucky to have Alok Kejriwal, Games2Win and Anuj Khurana, PurpleTrail talk to the community.
If you look at how India-centric Social Networks are shaping up, the importance of today’s talk is amplified. In fact, traffic & engagement is every thing to the Social Networking arena.
Back in 7/2007, BigAdda launched with a multi-crore marketing campaign. They blanketed billboards, television and FM. The ferocity of their campaigns threw the Industry in to confusion. Could an explosive mix of Money and mass-market advertising replace patient and painstaking build up of word-of-mouth? The heads of Chakpak and IndyaRocks kept their sanity and did not follow suit.
Two years down, the short-term advantage gained through marketing spend has been nullified. At the time this was written, Alexa shows the three social networks to be neck and neck in reach.
Alexa - IndyaRocks (blue), BigAdda (red), Chakpak (green)
Marketing on the Web on a zero-budget is all about long-term strategy over short-term tactical advantage. Even if it does seem frivolous to talk about social networks from an individual’s perspective, engaging an audience of over 5 Million UU’s every month is something else.
~ Santosh
Vibhushan comments: Reliance (ADAG) tried to use their standard strategy for launching any new product/service. As we have seen with their telecom and DTH launch, they love storming market with a big bang, capture market share initially by bleeding heavily and milk the acquired customers later on. However the point they missed was that as against CDMA handset and DTH setup, internet portal has very less or zero switching cost, and hence unless you dont have a very good product, you would lose customers.
Anyways, one good thing that happened out of this in 2007-2008 was that it increased the money spent on internet advertising in India. I am sure many websites surviving on advertisements must have seen their revenues going up and would be praying for more such launches from ADAG.
tinker on 
It was my first POCC meet, and I had a gr8 experience.
Liked the session talks and also good to see active participants.
I have lots to learn…
And you organized the event well. Keep it up
Reliance (ADAG) tried to use their standard strategy for launching any new product/service. As we have seen with their telecom and DTH launch, they love storming market with a big bang, capture market share initially by bleeding heavily and milk the acquired customers later on. However the point they missed was that as against CDMA handset and DTH setup, internet portal has very less or zero switching cost, and hence unless you dont have a very good product, you would lose customers.
Anyways, one good thing that happened out of this in 2007-2008 was that it increased the money spent on internet advertising in India. I am sure many websites surviving on advertisements must have seen their revenues going up and would be praying for more such launches from ADAG.
Hi Vibhushan,
You are right about zero-switching cost nullifying the return on mass-market advertising. Thank you for the insightful comments.
– Santosh
Hi Bhavya,
I’m glad you are considering joining the OpenCoffee Club! I hope the community can be of help you in your new venture.
– Santosh
We are also faced with an uphill task of growing organic traffic at Quikr (www.quikr.com) but are making great progress by sticking to the basics. Buying advertising only works in the short run but not in the long haul.
Ironically there are so many basics to growing your natural traffic (as laid down by Google) yet many websites seem ignorant about them and tend to view the web like any other medium where money can buy you traffic/usage.
But since you leave a trail on the Internet, your past usually helps you grow in the future, unlike any other medium. And that is the biggest contributor to your natural traffic growth.
Hi Vijay, Thanks for stopping by!
Would Quikr consider increasing it’s readership/reach with a combination of online/offline readers? Circulation costs are probably a deterrent here.
Apart from the local newspapers, I can’t pick up a free copy of (just) local classifieds at my local kiranewala / pharmacy / thela’s etc. It is hard to ignore the fact that the bulk of India does not have access to the Internet.
Segments like “cars for sale”, “homes for rent” are deeply local and can go a week before they go stale?
– Santosh
We cannot ignore the offline segment in the classifieds space. Infact unlike the west, India is one of the few markets where print reach is increasing and currently far outweighs Internet. This will slowly change but till that happens we will need to be accessible via other means such as print / mobile etc.
Your thoughts are right on the local & shelf life part. We will try and address this innovatively.
Thanks a ton!
Hey Vijay, Thank you for sharing Quikr’s outlook on India.
who are the people running Indyarocks?Whats their funding status.Any idea folks?